Good tech adventures start with some frustration, a need, or a requirement. This is the story of how I simplified the management and access of my local web applications with the help of Traefik and dnsmasq. The reasoning applies just as well for a production server using Docker.

My dev environment is composed of a growing number of web applications self-hosted on my laptop. Such applications include several websites, tools, editors, registries, … They use databases, REST APIs, or more complex backends. Take the example of Supabase, the Docker Compose file includes the Studio, the Kong API gateway, the authentication service, the REST service, the real-time service, the storage service, the meta service, and the PostgreSQL database.

The result is a growing number of containers started on my laptop, accessible at localhost on various ports. Some of them use the default ports and cannot run in parallel to